Landing an EM role requires two things:
Getting the interview
Acing the interview
Most candidates struggle with the first. A common stat: it takes 10 applications to land one interview. The market is competitive, so people cast a wide net. More applications = more chances, right?
Well, not really. When your profile tries to fit every role, it ends up fitting none. A focused job search strategy works better. That’s the focus of today’s article - and I’ve asked someone who knows this inside and out to break it down with REAL examples.
Alex is a Director of Software at Infineon with 18 years of industry experience, and also a seasoned Career & Leadership Coach.
Together with Uzair Khan, an Engineering Manager at Stripe, they teach the “Acing Engineering Manager Interviews” course, designed to help EMs land their next role.
The next cohort starts July 26. Use the code MANAGERDEV10 for 10% off:
(not affiliated/sponsored!)
Mic to Alex 🎤
Before we dive into the 5-step process, let’s start with the basics: your goal is to make your profile and CV feel like a perfect fit for the roles you’re applying to.
With 100+ applicants per role, even if you pass the ATS (Applicant Tracking System), a recruiter or hiring manager will spend no more than 10 seconds scanning your resume. You want to capture their attention and make it clear right away:
1. Why you’re awesome
2. Why you’re a great fit for their role
This is where the focused job search strategy comes in. You don’t apply for every EM opening. You apply for the EM openings that are right for you, AND you have the profile to match.
To make this article practical, I’m going to use real examples from an EM I’ve coached (name and facts changed) - Alan.
Alan is an experienced Senior Manager. He has been working in the financial sector and is now looking for a new role. In his last role at Barclays - the 5th largest bank in Europe - Alan led teams building data platforms used by internal traders. Later, he worked on infrastructure that supported the full software development lifecycle for products handling about $50B in yearly transactions.
Here are the 5 steps I went through with Alan:
1. Get specific
Start by getting very specific on the role you’d love to have:
Org type
Org size
Culture
Product
The kind of manager
The kind of responsibilities
And so on. Many EMs right away say FAANG. Big brand, big salary, big impact. But after some introspection and prodding, this typically changes to things like: “Work on something meaningful”, “Work with great people”, “Make a positive impact on society.”
There’s a whole world beyond FAANG (not that FAANG is bad) that’s out there which may be a much better fit for you.
In Alan’s case, it was FAANG :)
He decided that his priorities are:
To make the transition to tech companies (preferably big tech)
To work with the latest tech stacks
Work closely with AI
Lead data engineering teams
2. Analyze relevant openings
Once you get clarity on the role you’d LOVE to have, the next step is to find matching job openings. Categorize them as “Love it”, “meh”, and “no way”. Choose 5 - 10 of the “Love it” job openings and use those as the blueprint for the kind of jobs you want to target.
For Alan, we identified data infrastructure EM roles at Figma, Amazon, Notion, Netflix, and Meta.
3. Find common requirements
Now it’s time to extract the common requirements from the jobs you selected in step 2 to understand their criteria.
If you’re applying for mission-driven orgs, they will want you to be aligned with the mission. Startups may emphasize being a “player-coach” and wearing many hats. Big orgs will emphasize stakeholder management and hiring. This is your blueprint for your ideal role.
Then we looked for patterns: What do these roles want in a candidate?
In Alan’s case, they all prioritized:
People leadership (hiring + growing)
Strong data engineering background
Stakeholder communication
Experience in leading business-critical teams and products
Experience in scaling systems
4. Adjust your profile and CV
You’ve defined your ideal role in step 1. In steps 2+3 we got clarity on the criteria that such roles require. Now it’s time to bring those two together and tailor your profile to be a fit for the roles you’d love to have.
This step takes the most time. The hardest part is knowing what to delete, what to emphasize, and what to keep. You have to be ruthless.
Your profile (LinkedIn + resume) serves one purpose only: to get a callback. It’s not about going deep in your experience and showing all the many different things that you’ve done. No one gets hired from the resume alone. You need to bring your greatest hits, without holding back.
Make it so compelling that the recruiter will not be able to resist giving you a call to find out more.
In Alan’s case, his resume was focused purely on results and full of financial jargon. Anyone outside the financial sector would struggle to grasp the scale and context of what he did.
To align with his ideal roles, we emphasized more leadership aspects like leading senior ICs + managers, coaching + promotions, hiring, and growing teams. We also simplified the language to make it more ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5). We emphasized his data engineering experience and translated his title from “Vice President” (typical in large banks) to a tech equivalent of Senior Engineering Manager.
We chose to bring 4 elements to the forefront of his resume:
Leadership: built and led global teams of ICs + managers
Impressive achievement: accelerated release cycle of critical products (~$50B in transactions) from 6 months to 9 weeks
Impressive achievement: scaled critical data platforms by 3x to process 100K ETL jobs/day
Impressive achievement: scaled data distribution platform by 10x to handle 20M+ transactions/day
In the experience section, I recommend starting with the scope and responsibilities for each role. Then, use the next points to highlight clear and impressive achievements, focusing on the impact and change you drove, tying it back to the common requirements you found in step 3.
The important part is knowing what you want to get across, and then you can just use ChatGPT to formulate it in a concise way.
Here’s an example:
Context: Led global teams to improve the quality, velocity, and dev workflows across all of Barclays’ consumer-facing products, including MasterCard, with 15M+ customers and $50B+ in annual transactions
Achievement: Accelerated Release Cycles from 6 months to 9 weeks for consumer products, covering 3000+ GitLab projects and 700+ developers
Achievement: Reduced total build time by 150+ hours per week by standardizing the build process across 800+ Java projects
Leadership: Grew multiple teams from the ground up across the US, UK, Singapore, and India. Built a culture of engineering excellence through hands-on mentoring and coaching.
Now to the LinkedIn profile. Here, your single key asset is the headline.
You want to stand out, so the recruiter or hiring manager will absolutely have to look further. Alan’s LinkedIn was generic: “Engineering Leadership @ Barclays | High-Performance Teams | Agile Development…”.
So we adjusted it to emphasize similar elements to the resume summary. “Senior Eng. Manager @ Barclays | 6+ years leading global teams | Scaled & modernized data platforms (20M+ txns/day) | Led MasterCard Savings ($50B txns/year)”
5. Start networking
You are almost there. The next step is being proactive and not counting only on your CV to do the job.
Now that you have clarity on the types of roles + orgs you would love to work for, you know who to target.
There are 3 key personas to look for:
Your 1st network connections
Start simply - look at your 1st network connections and begin reaching out to the people that work in your targeted orgs. Ideally, people whom you really know.
With these people, your goal is to get a referral, but don’t treat it like a one-way street. For example, you can start by reaching out to ex-employees from your current org who work at your target companies. You don’t need to be sneaky and hide that you are looking for a job, but you for sure can have a genuine conversation, engage with their content, offer some advice, and maybe even connect them to someone who could help them.
Hiring managers
Try to find the hiring manager for the roles you are applying to (or at least in the same area of the company). Here, you can be more direct and get to the point. Read through what their department does, and send a personalized message of why you’re enthusiastic to solve those challenges.
Because you choose those roles carefully, it’s not a lie, you ARE excited about it! It’s your dream role!
Recruiters
The recruiters have a problem (fill the role), and you can be the solution. It’s a win-win.
Send a connection request or DM concisely outlining what you bring to the table (similar to the resume summary) and also why you’re enthusiastic for the role. Your LinkedIn headline should grab their attention, and the concise summary of your achievements will reel them in.
This will not work 100% of the time, but even if you have a 20% success rate resulting in a callback, you’re still well ahead of most EMs.
Your network can be your lifeline, so treat it as such.
The next step - prepare for the interviews
The focus of the article was on getting those first interviews, but I also wanted to share a couple of tips for the interviews themselves.
The EM role is fundamentally different from IC work, and so is the hiring process. As an IC, technical competence is your primary currency. As an EM, it's about translating business needs to technical execution while growing people and managing complexity.
While you'll still face technical rounds (system design, possibly DSA), these are just filters - minimum bars you must meet. The real decision happens in behavioral interviews, which typically account for ~80% of the hiring criteria.
So now that you know the kinds of roles, orgs, and cultures you’re targeting, you can also narrow your focus in how you prepare for interviews. A question like “tell me about a time you overcame a technical obstacle to deliver?” can have different expectations from a start-up vs. big-tech.
In a start-up, the emphasis should be all about speed and plowing through obstacles. In big tech, the expectations may be to first deliver but then ensure you set up a process to make sure the issue doesn’t repeat. And of course, aligning with your stakeholders and keeping them updated.
For Alan, whose focus was on FAANG, their hiring process is well documented. For example, at Amazon, every question is related to evaluating one of their leadership principles. And at Meta, the focus is more on the breadth rather than the depth of your experience.
Most EMs fail interviews by sounding like ICs - over-explaining projects, missing the deeper intent of behavioral questions, and hiding behind team efforts (saying “we” instead of “I”).
What hiring managers really want is proof you can handle difficult situations, influence stakeholders, and navigate ambiguity. In your stories, you want to demonstrate extreme ownership, emotional intelligence, and resilience.
And most importantly, show up as your genuine self. Don’t aim for perfect answers or try to present yourself as the ideal leader. Trust is the number one factor in the EM hiring criteria, so don't give the interviewer any reason to doubt you.
EM interviews are less about what you’ve done, and more about how you think. That’s what gets you the offer.
Alan is at the early stages of this journey, but he’s already landed an interview at Meta and is building serious momentum.
This approach works.
I’ve used the same process to help clients land EM roles at Amazon, Palo Alto Networks, Oracle, and unicorns.
Yes, the market is competitive. But that doesn’t mean you have to lower your sights.You can still land the role you want. You just need to be strategic about how you go after it.
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